It was a period of great confusion. The Roil infiltrating cities with ease, and the Old Men bringing fairy tales to life with their murderous hungers. Stade had released them, and he knew what he was doing (how rarely he did not). But that did not make it any less cruel an act. You do not let the old stories out: you do not let them trample the earth beneath their boots.
We may not have understood quite what they were, but the outcomes were all too easy to comprehend. Blood and death, from the moment he sprang their cages.
Remember this, Warwick Milde may have released John Cadell, but it was Stade who did it for the rest.
THE VILLAGE OF COB 682 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
They arrived with the night — silent but for gunshots, and the screams of their victims, though the latter never lasted long.
It was dangerous land, north above the flood plains of Mirrlees, caught between the edges of the Margin and the Gathering Plains, where the rains fall cold and hard, and death takes a myriad horrible forms. However, there was money to be earned there, salvaging the ruins of a war decades gone. And the people who made it their home were used to horror. After all they picked at its scab, found a living in all those deathly Mechanisms.
Venin had worked as a scavenger and a guard for a dozen years, and he had lived through Cuttlefolk incursions, and a fungal murderous creature known only as the Meer; he’d even survived a night alone in the Margin. (One that had started with five other men. He still heard them calling, some evenings, on the wind — if it blew in from the west.) Rumour was he’d killed a Verger, long ago, had run for his life to Cob, far from anywhere, certainly far from any city justice. Well, there might have been some truth to that, but Venin had never expanded upon it, nor denied it anyway. And talk, as it did, died down.
He’d stayed in the town, and risen in the community’s estimation. And if he’d not killed a Verger, there was no denying he had iron in him. Sort of man you could rely on.
Even Venin had considered himself that.
Not any more.
He’d bolted the heavy door at the first screams, all impulse to aid fled. He held his gun in shaking hands, the weapon primed. They will pass me by, Venin thought. They will pass me by.
He’d hardly breathed as first the Starlins next door screamed out their life- and them with a new babe and three younglings — the Wilsons two doors up followed (after the rapid-fire bursts of Caddle Wilson’s shotgun).
The screams stopped. And for a few quiet minutes, he thought he might live out the night — until something sniffed at his door. Venin stepped backwards slowly, crouched down behind a table he had overturned, resting the rifle on its edge, slowly, slowly applying pressure to the trigger.
The door shook against its hinges, once, twice.
Silence.
His breath steamed from his mouth, his fingers chilled. The door creaked, a crack streaked along the floor towards him. What forces could move the earth so?
The bolt slid free, struck the floor and shattered.
The door opened. A figure framed in the doorway, limbs delicate and long, and light that flowed from a hand as though it had turned to silk. Gave Venin enough light to get in a good shot.
He fired twice, the rifle jumping in his grip, banging against the table, like he was new to shooting, like he was just a boy with years ahead of him, and no reputation to uphold.
Boots slapped on the floor, not at all a graceful sound, but quick — like the swift turnings of some mechanism built for speed. Hands wrenched Venin to his feet. His own piss warmed his pants, then chilled in them. The grip that held him was bitterly terribly cold, and it spread to his limbs. He twitched, tried to lift the rifle — instead it fell from his fingers. His teeth chattered. His limbs shook.
Venin looked up into a sophisticated face with pale watery eyes, lit with a fierce hunger. An Old Man’s face. The sorrow he saw there shocked him, almost enough that he didn’t feel the pain. But not quite.
“It should never have been this way, but the boy, he gave his strength to the boy. Our flesh is cold, our punishment severe, and you must share in that. We need the strength, we need the speed,” the Old Man whispered in his ear. “Believe me, I am truly sorry for what I am to do.”
But it didn’t stop him.
The Old Men stood at the edge of the town, the grass around their feet dying, freezing. Once they had ruled Shale, directed all its energies to science and industry. And they had failed, and they had been punished. The whole world had been punished, and that punishment, in part, meant that no one could dwell on it.
You mastered the cold or it mastered you.
Every town they passed through died. And those lucky few that came upon the remains knew nothing of what had happened there, but death and the quiet relief that it had passed them by. Once, perhaps, these Old Men would have been hunted, but no one possessed the resources or the knowledge to do so any more. And so they were left to race and to devour.
“He’s that way,” they whispered. “He’s that way,” they spat, gripped with madness and a wild joy. “Far away, but always nearer.”
Fed, but already growing hungry, they rushed from one darkness into another. Heading north, where the boy was. And the thing that Cadell had become.